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Rites of Passage
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These Poems cover rites of passage in general and particulary the teenage years. They grapple with the issues and the angst surrounding that phase of life.
| I am so hungry | Inadequate | |
| From the opposition | Impossible thing | Twenty First Century Woman |
| Java Poem | Internet illusions | The children's actor |
I am so hungry
So afraid of my hunger
Lest it devour me.
I wanted to fly
And felt myself falling
So terribly fast.
So I become obese
And fear being high
But the yearning won’t cease.
You do not know what life is like,
Have not emerged from the cocoon of childish dreams
You are inadequate.
We will take you and strip away your aspirations
Then remold you, we will bring you down to earth and hold you.
We will cast you, mask you, break and remake you.
Until you can stand alone and scream to the tops of the mountains,
I am adequate.
You will remember the childhood promises and know what you have lost,
Until you whisper,
I am inadequate.
That’s when I felt like a betrayer,
Wanting to call all our secrets down the hall.
They are so big and so small.
I need only one witness,
Just to listen and say yes
I believe what you perceive.
We all stand around the accident
Sometimes it’s me and I pity the bystanders.
Who can say what happened?
We each have our versions.
It’s valid to know what you know
Also to know compassion.
I try to see with your eyes
Its only when I hate looking at me
That I wonder
What the truth is and
What’s just propaganda.
Ah, my zealous defender of justice,
Still guarding your bone from me?
You will never trust me,
You detect two much lightness and frivolity.
I will dance around your rules,
A fool busy making fools.
I will chuck you beneath the chin
Hoping for a smile to begin,
Oh, how you glower,
You smile but are sour.
As much as I follow an inclination
You have your own justification.
Stay close to your principles,
Perhaps you will make me humble.
The contest is for enlightenment,
In this, there should be no resentment.
She was an impossible thing
Of string and wax and feathers.
How mad to love so much,
How foolish to take it so hard.
A girl for the pages of literature
But not to live in the world.
Those girls are always smiling
Always wearing beautiful façades.
She lets her stockings ladder
Her mascara run
She is sadder that those girls.
Her feelings overwhelm her
They have a violence that unmasks her,
She thinks it is so all the time
If that where true she might as well die.
No one can cry so much without drowning.
No one can poison her heart without discovering suffering.
If she lives she will learn to be milder
To let the flame burn no higher
These passions are for youth
Their drama doesn’t give them truth.
I wish that the world wanted me just as I am,
I’m all wrong for twenty first century woman.
I’m more like your nineteenth century heroine.
Wanting to die for love and wondering how they did that
Though I only read modern novels, almost non fiction.
I lost interest in fantasy, seeing it held little hope for me.
I wanted to be a nun in some distant land
Away from the glitter of consumer culture,
All those girls slim and pretty from head to toe
My cloths are art my cloths are old
Really no one cares about clothes
They like breasts instead.
Listen to the beat of chain rock on the radio
Sing a lick and imagine yourself as a star
Show a breast or a car
Leave a friend after your shadows have kissed
Lie with a smooth bed beneath you
Sleep naked and cry
Only after the summer sun sinks.
Urged on by easy finger play
I fall at the feet of shadowy friends.
I click and shift and click again
Then onwards without end.
They move behind a screen of words
I yearn to crush the language bed.
We hover like lights in a dark place
Driving forth our writing demons
Revealing the monsters and the angels
Of which we have been dreaming.
I seek and hope my charm reaches
Across the boundaries of space and place
Into the Internet’s arms.
They will make you into a canvas shield,
A clever child forever…
Delicate and only knowing the light of love.
Through all the tawdry haze
Of the passing days
Against the panorama of life
In all its strange shapes
Your face will shine out brightly
With a solemnity that humbles us
But will you be allowed
To step tremulously
To the brink of adulthood?